A few people have contacted us, alerting us to the video (below) of someone completing Portal in 18 minutes and 5 seconds. Blimey.

Poster Maciej “groobo” Maselewski (see more of his speed runs here) believes he could get it under 18 minutes. He explains,

“Timing starts when you wake up in your cell, ends when you destroy glados’s last orb, minus loading times. Also sorry for the bad aiming/positioning at the escape levels, I always get super nervous when I get to that part.”

Part two if you’ll only click on the following:

YouTube links in case the GameVideo stuff won’t buffer properly for you: Part One and Part Two.

Here’s one of groobotubes comments on Youtube. (It was on the first page, he had just posted it…. I don’t actually read Youtube comments. I swear.)

groobotube:

Remember that this run was done entirely in one go, aka single-segment. There are 7s of mistakes on my part. Also take in note that I got VERY lucky on exactly three parts in the run, which all together cover way more time than 7s. The only way to get portal under 18 minutes single-segment would be to keep the companion cube after you wallclimb on it(which btw happens really rarely even during practice), plus you would have to replicate the amount of luck I had while doing this run.>

derFeef: I think this guy gets his enjoyment from knowing the game like the back of his hand and being able to go as fast as possible. His enjoyment comes from mastering the gameplay and the limits of the game.

Never have the words “You euthanised your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations.” been truer. And never has the demand for peptic salve and adrenaline been so low.

Sod that. I took a lot longer than “normal” because I often waited around to see if she’d say something else. And I *really* took my time at the end, because I thought as I got closer to the end of the countdown she’d start gloating or something. Threw the last piece in at like 8 seconds or so.

This could be the alcohol inducing this motion sickness, but this guy needs to calm down and stop being so ADHD. The whole thing seems like one long dash to the Aperture Science toilet after the third pint of Wetherspoons festival Real Ale (not at all relevant to my situation now).

Still, damned impressive stuff. I couldn’t keep up with some parts of it.

How did he get all those core’s from GLaDOS before she even dropped the first one?. :S Maybe I missed something…

See how he takes the turret and gets it to shoot him through the portal in the floor of the corridor leading to Glados? It’s also hitting Glados – each bit of damage she takes leads to an orb dropping, so the rapid fire of the turret makes them all drop in that short burst.

He went through some of those rooms so fast I couldn’t tell where he was. I think the last room may be his masterpiece. One wonders if he could have done if faster if instead of the chair he’d used the trick posted earlier.

This was just crazy, i love the game but hell…way too much time on the ‘ol hands to make everyone else puke from motion sickness. I haven’t checked the other links yet but can you bunny hop throught the game like that? Second, i’d like to see him tackle HL2 with the teleport gun…

Doubtful. Speedruns have been part of gaming history since the dawn of Quake. There are speedruns for all of Valve’s singleplayer games. Half-Life has been done in 30 minutes!!! In fact there are achievements where you race against the clock, so I think it’s highly likely the level designers were anticipating speedruns.

I’ve seen a lot of the individual sections done 25-75% faster, but what’s most impressive about this run is that it’s a single run with only the loading times edited out. It can be done faster, but it would take an equally impressive display of skill and concentration.